certificates of character to people they do not know, and
recommendation letters to those for whom they have no use.

So the letter went for little with Robert Schumann--it was the way
Brahms approached the piano, and settled his hands and great shock-head
over the keyboard, that won.

"He is no beginner," whispered Clara to Robert before Johannes had
touched a key.

It didn't take Brahms long to get acquainted--he mixed well. In a few
days he dropped into that half-affectionate way of calling his host and
hostess by their first names, and they in turn called him "Johannes."
And to me this is very beautiful, for, at the last, souls are all of one
age. More and more we are realizing that getting old is only a bad
habit. The only man who is old is the one who thinks he is. Of course
these remarks about age do not exactly apply just here, for no member of
the trinity we are discussing was advanced in years. Robert was
forty-three, Clara was thirty-four, and Johannes was twenty.

Johannes Brahms was thrice well blest in being well born. His parents
were middle-class people, fairly well-to-do. They proved themselves
certainly more than middle-class in intellect, when they adopted the
plan of being the companions and comrades of their children. Johannes
grew up with no slavish fear of "old folks." He had worked with his
father, studied with him; learned lessons from books with his mother,
and played "four hands" with her at the piano, by the hour, just for
fun.

Then when Remenyi came that way with his violin, and wanted a pianist,
he took young Brahms. When their lines crossed the line of Liszt, they
played for him at his inn; and then Liszt played for them.

This Remenyi was our own "Ol' Man Remenyi," who passed over only a year
or so ago. I wonder if he was Ol' Man Remenyi then! He never really was
an old man, and that appellation was more a mark of esteem than anything
else--a sort of diminutive of good-will. I met Remenyi at Chautauqua,
where he spent a month or more in Eighteen Hundred Ninety-three. He gave
me my first introduction to the music of Brahms, of whom he never tired
of talking. He considered Brahms without a rival--the culminating flower
of modern music; and if the Ol' Man slightly exaggerated his own
influence in bringing Brahms out and presenting him to the world, I am
not the one to charge it up against his memory.

In explaining Brahms and his music, Remenyi used to grow animated, and
when words